============================================================ TITLE: How to Get Your Organization Started with Master Data? TYPE: blog VERSION: 1 VERSION_ID: 00957413-ba95-4d74-8fec-5448c74b951c GENERATED_AT: 2026-01-29T03:29:37.622Z SUMMARY: Check out this blog to learn more about how can organizations start with master data AUTHOR: Felice Ferri DATE PUBLISHED: September 7, 2022 READING TIME: 11 min WORD COUNT: 2142 SOURCE URL: https://lhpiot.com/blog/how-to-get-your-organization-started-with-master-data ============================================================ KEY TAKEAWAYS: * How to Get Your Organization Started with Master Data? * How to Leverage Master Data? * What is the value of Master Data within an Organization?  And why is Master Data Essential? * Summary:  Taking a Step Towards Organizational Success ## How to Get Your Organization Started with Master Data? Master data plays a critical role in your organization by ensuring organizational visibility, operational efficiency, and product functional safety. As data becomes increasingly complex, the need for master data in the automotive industry will continue to grow. This blog is the third in a 3-part series focused on the importance of master data, the technical architecture of master data systems, and the trade-offs and constraints that come with building them, ultimately proposing what a proper master data plan looks like to help organizations achieve growth and success. The content in each blog is centered on the main topics from LHP’s Master Data Webinar. * Part 1 is entitled “The Critical Role of Master Data in Engineering and Functional Safety.” It outlines the overall impact that master data has on the transportation industry, emphasizing its direct correlation with engineering and functional safety. * Part 2 is entitled “Building Master Data Systems: Architecture, Trade-offs, and Constraints.” It focuses on the technical architecture of master data systems while presenting three scenarios that illustrate the trade-offs involved and any lingering constraints. * Part 3 is entitled “Getting Started with Master Data.” It describes the importance of master data to an organization and what implementing a master data solution can look like for several types of organizations. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the critical role of master data in engineering and functional safety, examining the importance of controlling your organization’s datasets, especially given the ever-present phenomenon of autonomous, hybrid, and electric vehicles. Also briefly covered was the Master Data Management process and how it can benefit engineers during product development. In part 2, we dissected the technical architecture of master data systems and found the trade-offs and constraints that come with building them. Now, in part 3, we hope to provide a promising path for organizations to follow when implementing master data, enabling them to achieve their goals across engineering/manufacturing, workflows, and analytics. ## How to Leverage Master Data? As conveyed in parts 1 and 2 of our blog series, master data should be viewed as your golden ticket. It’s all the information pertaining to business activities that influences internal decision-making, revenue, and organizational growth. Prioritizing master data is not only an opportunity to streamline and leverage your data but also to improve organizational efficiency. The best way to maintain data in your single source of truth (SSOT) is to implement a Master Data Management plan that reflects your overall needs and goals. There are different ways to get started with this process, and each route should ensure that the most accurate data components are available to the right people at the right time, in real-time. Getting started with master data requires sufficient research beforehand. You have to know where your organization is in the overall business and where you want it to be. Then, part of this research involves exposing the right people to all this unstructured data—there will be a lot of collaboration across departments. Getting started with master data could involve data analysts, system developers, and IT specialists, amongst other employees within your organization. Gathering data from different regions of the business will create a sense of urgency, encouraging you to clarify which data is essential for growth and success and which is inconsequential. During this research phase, you may ask questions like: * What are our overall goals? When do we plan on accomplishing them? * Is our data succinct enough to help us improve productivity? * How can we improve our internal workflow, processes, procedures, products, and systems? * What other companies do we see ourselves working with? How do their goals align with ours? After your organization has analyzed the specific needs and goals you want to achieve, the next step is choosing an MDM solution style, which ultimately determines the software/application tool you will use. The four commonly used styles are: registry, consolidation, coexistence, and centralized; each has its own capabilities and benefits. Again, your choice of implementation style will be based on what seems the most rewarding for your organization. These proactive steps are necessary to guarantee a successful MDM strategy;  this way, proper preparation prevents poor performance. ## What is the value of Master Data within an Organization?  And why is Master Data Essential? For the past decade, the value of master data has evolved into a pillar that affects your organization across the board. More importantly, it provides internal visibility and traceability, allowing organizations to better understand what their data means and how it can help them achieve their goals. In engineering, one pivotal process that is heavily data-dependent is product life-cycle development;  motor vehicles are the best example. The entire life of a vehicle begins at the concept stage. The requirements for these products must comply with many engineering standards and safety regulations, which affect how vehicles are designed. Once OEMs receive the raw materials, they can keep track of all the items needed for production, ensuring nothing is missing or faulty. When considering the growth of autonomous, electric, and hybrid vehicles alongside our current conventional vehicles, data is critical to ensuring these products operate as intended once OEMs distribute them to the market for people to buy and use. The technology in these vehicles communicates information about products’ operational performance when people use them; that continuous feedback loop is important. Though this somewhat extends into the conversation about data analytics, it is important to discuss because of how directly an organization’s master data influences the analysis of that data. Aside from the more technical considerations, your master data also affects any business your organization conducts with other companies. In the aforementioned example, important data is involved in product life cycle development. Once an OEM creates a cohort of vehicles, it must distribute its products to car dealerships. The master data records involved in this delivery process can include information such as: * The raw material suppliers * The dealership locations * Warranties, contracts, policies, and licenses * Any potential vendors that help market the vehicles It is clear that master data adds significant value to an organization from a business standpoint and an operational standpoint. The master data system your organization develops and the MDM solution you implement influence how you execute production, which in turn affects the overall level of success. ### What Type of Benefits Does Master Data Provide? Though it may seem like a rhetorical remark, the primary benefit that master data provides is organizational success. It is important to emphasize this because this core data asset is still something organizations struggle to prioritize. Consolidating your most valuable data and centralizing it in one location can enable more efficient strategizing, which positively influences coordination across teams. Since all the information in your data systems is in its most accurate state, you can accelerate workflow productivity while mitigating process errors. With everything aligning, there is a greater chance that organizational performance will thrive—amplifying profits and revenue. Again, this can be an advantage because competing organizations may not have their master data prioritized. In our webinar panel, we take time to shed light on a master data implementation we did for a customer. They reached out to us because they needed someone to build an MDM solution. Their data was scattered across several regions, making it difficult to access. To reference the potential trade-offs mentioned in the previous blog in this series, their internal systems' performance wasn’t very good. Our work with them was a year-long solution implementation process that involved gathering all the data, understanding its sources, and versioning any changes, which ultimately allowed them to access all their data whenever they needed to. The versioning aspect was especially important because the customer could view older versions of specific data across several systems. Even now, the customer is utilizing the solution we implemented for them. It is now the core service that enables them to access and update their master data to align with their goals and needs. ### The Challenges and Precautions of Master Data There is great power in your organization’s datasets, but that power has to be identified, refined, and maintained. One key precaution is ensuring your organization has control over its data; without proper control, you can create challenges for your organization’s overall performance. In other words, you want to know what pieces of data are most important to your organization and have an easy way to access them all. It is common for organizations to find themselves in the dilemma of not centralizing their data, but they should not delay this for long. There are particular challenges that organizations face frequently, which include: * Inefficient and time-consuming processes caused by unstructured data * Errors caused by inconsistent, redundant, or missing pieces of data * Decreased profitability due to an increase in data-related spending expenses * Inability to properly sustain other data-related processes, like data governance Overall, managing and maintaining master data can be a tedious, time-consuming process that requires frequent collaboration and, depending on the size of an organization, may be difficult to achieve. Sometimes organizations may have the time to implement an MDM solution but not the resources to fund it, so they choose a cheaper option that may not fully meet their goals and needs. In some cases, organizations may have the resources to fund an MDM solution but just not the time. As with the work we did for that former customer, they knew their data was scattered across their internal systems and needed assistance consolidating and streamlining it. These are some of the many considerations involved with implementing an MDM solution. ## Summary:  Taking a Step Towards Organizational Success By prioritizing your master data and implementing a proper MDM solution, you are taking a step towards organizational growth and success. Due to the growing need for data centralization, the transportation industry is evolving. Data influences OEMs and organizations from a business and engineering/manufacturing standpoint, as operational efficiency shapes the products and systems being engineered and distributed to the market. As the data ecosystem continues to transcend innovative technology and products in the automotive world to come, it will become much more of a requirement (than it already is) to optimize your data and the processes involved. Data is one of the most diverse organizational assets that adds significant value to this industry, helping generate safer products on the roads we use every day. In Part 3 of this series, we have covered how your organization can get started with centralizing and managing your datasets. In describing the value of master data, we also identified potential challenges and promising benefits. Overall, we have highlighted key aspects of master data, its impact on your organization, and its importance in the transportation industry. ### Interested in learning more about Master Data for your organization? Contact our team today! ------------------------------------------------------------ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: Q: How to Get Your Organization Started with Master Data? A: Master data plays a critical role in your organization by ensuring organizational visibility, operational efficiency, and product functional safety. As data becomes increasingly complex, the need for master data in the automotive industry will continue to grow. This blog is the third in a 3-part series focused on the importance of master data, the technical architecture of master data systems, and the trade-offs and constraints that come with building them, ultimately proposing what a proper master data plan looks like to help organizations achieve growth and success. The content in each blog is centered on the main topics from LHP’s Master Data Webinar. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the critical role of master data in engineering and functional safety, examining the importance of controlling your organization’s datasets, especially given the ever-present phenomenon of autonomous, hybrid, and electric vehicles. Also briefly covered was the Master Data Management process and how it can benefit engineers during product development. In part 2, we dissected the technical architecture of master data systems and found the trade-offs and constraints that come with building them. Now, in part 3, we hope to provide a promising path for organizations to follow when implementing master data, enabling them to achieve their goals across engineering/manufacturing, workflows, and analytics. Q: How to Leverage Master Data? A: As conveyed in parts 1 and 2 of our blog series, master data should be viewed as your golden ticket. It’s all the information pertaining to business activities that influences internal decision-making, revenue, and organizational growth. Prioritizing master data is not only an opportunity to streamline and leverage your data but also to improve organizational efficiency. The best way to maintain data in your single source of truth (SSOT) is to implement a Master Data Management plan that reflects your overall needs and goals. There are different ways to get started with this process, and each route should ensure that the most accurate data components are available to the right people at the right time, in real-time. Getting started with master data requires sufficient research beforehand. You have to know where your organization is in the overall business and where you want it to be. Then, part of this research involves exposing the right people to all this unstructured data—there will be a lot of collaboration across departments. Getting started with master data could involve data analysts, system developers, and IT specialists, amongst other employees within your organization. Gathering data from different regions of the business will create a sense of urgency, encouraging you to clarify which data is essential for growth and success and which is inconsequential. During this research phase, you may ask questions like: After your organization has analyzed the specific needs and goals you want to achieve, the next step is choosing an MDM solution style, which ultimately determines the software/application tool you will use. The four commonly used styles are: registry, consolidation, coexistence, and centralized; each has its own capabilities and benefits. Again, your choice of implementation style will be based on what seems the most rewarding for your organization. These proactive steps are necessary to guarantee a successful MDM strategy;  this way, proper preparation prevents poor performance. Q: What is the value of Master Data within an Organization?  And why is Master Data Essential? A: For the past decade, the value of master data has evolved into a pillar that affects your organization across the board. More importantly, it provides internal visibility and traceability, allowing organizations to better understand what their data means and how it can help them achieve their goals. In engineering, one pivotal process that is heavily data-dependent is product life-cycle development;  motor vehicles are the best example. The entire life of a vehicle begins at the concept stage. The requirements for these products must comply with many engineering standards and safety regulations, which affect how vehicles are designed. Once OEMs receive the raw materials, they can keep track of all the items needed for production, ensuring nothing is missing or faulty. When considering the growth of autonomous, electric, and hybrid vehicles alongside our current conventional vehicles, data is critical to ensuring these products operate as intended once OEMs distribute them to the market for people to buy and use. The technology in these vehicles communicates information about products’ operational performance when people use them; that continuous feedback loop is important. Though this somewhat extends into the conversation about data analytics, it is important to discuss because of how directly an organization’s master data influences the analysis of that data. Aside from the more technical considerations, your master data also affects any business your organization conducts with other companies. In the aforementioned example, important data is involved in product life cycle development. Once an OEM creates a cohort of vehicles, it must distribute its products to car dealerships. The master data records involved in this delivery process can include information such as: It is clear that master data adds significant value to an organization from a business standpoint and an operational standpoint. The master data system your organization develops and the MDM solution you implement influence how you execute production, which in turn affects the overall level of success. Q: What Type of Benefits Does Master Data Provide? A: Though it may seem like a rhetorical remark, the primary benefit that master data provides is organizational success. It is important to emphasize this because this core data asset is still something organizations struggle to prioritize. Consolidating your most valuable data and centralizing it in one location can enable more efficient strategizing, which positively influences coordination across teams. Since all the information in your data systems is in its most accurate state, you can accelerate workflow productivity while mitigating process errors. With everything aligning, there is a greater chance that organizational performance will thrive—amplifying profits and revenue. Again, this can be an advantage because competing organizations may not have their master data prioritized. In our webinar panel, we take time to shed light on a master data implementation we did for a customer. They reached out to us because they needed someone to build an MDM solution. Their data was scattered across several regions, making it difficult to access. To reference the potential trade-offs mentioned in the previous blog in this series, their internal systems' performance wasn’t very good. Our work with them was a year-long solution implementation process that involved gathering all the data, understanding its sources, and versioning any changes, which ultimately allowed them to access all their data whenever they needed to. The versioning aspect was especially important because the customer could view older versions of specific data across several systems. Even now, the customer is utilizing the solution we implemented for them. It is now the core service that enables them to access and update their master data to align with their goals and needs. ------------------------------------------------------------ ABOUT THIS CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------ Source: https://lhpiot.com/blog/how-to-get-your-organization-started-with-master-data Author: Felice Ferri Published: September 7, 2022 This content is provided for informational purposes. Please visit the original source for the most up-to-date information.